The high cost of cultural passivity: FAA's silly rules did exactly nothing
to stop the hijackers
Mark Steyn
National Post
There are standard formulations even for atrocity. "The Provisional IRA,"
some BBC announcer would intone week after week for 30 years, "has claimed
responsibility for the bomb which exploded at ... " Enniskillen, Canary
Wharf, Omagh, Hyde Park, wherever.
No one in the Middle East has yet "claimed responsibility" for the
massacres of last Tuesday. So perhaps it would help if someone in the
United States did. The obvious candidate is the Federal Aviation
Administration, which is guilty on two counts.
First, it failed to prevent last week's hijackings: The killers attempted
to seize four planes and succeeded in seizing four planes. Had they
attempted to seize another 30 planes, who can doubt that they would have
maintained their pristine 100% success rate? What happened on Tuesday was
not the odd guy slipping through a few "cracks in the system", but a
completely cracked system, whose failure was total. The scale of the
disaster was constrained only by the murderers' ambition and manpower.
Secondly, and more importantly, the many and elaborate "security" measures
the FAA did have in place contributed directly to the transformation of a
small contained horror into a mass catastrophe.
The FAA is perhaps the third most famous U.S. governmental acronym on the
planet, after the FBI and CIA. Any foreigner flying on foreign airlines
into Chicago or Dallas or Atlanta gets used to the rote incantation that
"FAA regulations prohibit" this or that humdrum manoeuvre. What an awesome
agency: Don't light up a furtive cigarette in the bathroom over Greenland;
the FAA will know and they will get you! In the small municipal airport of
Lebanon, New Hampshire, the only signs behind the ticket desk solemnly
inform you the FAA has determined that, say, Lagos International Airport in
Nigeria is unsafe. You can't fly to Lagos from Lebanon, N. H. There's
merely a flight per day to New York, Philadelphia and Boston. But, whether
because they were preoccupied with grading Lagos or for some other reason,
no one at the FAA ever determined Logan Airport, Boston, was unsafe -
though, as we now know, it is, profoundly so.
It's for that reason that it's important that the FAA administrator, Jane
Garvey, and her senior staff are asked to resign. It is time for them to
acknowledge "responsibility." If this is, as President Bush says, "the
first war of the 21st century," then here are a couple of relevant
precedents:
After the fall of France, Neville Chamberlain resigned.
Two days after the Argentine invasion of the Falklands in 1981, Peter
Carrington, Britain's Foreign Secretary, Humphrey Atkins, the Lord Privy
Seal, and Richard Luce, the Minister for Latin-American Affairs, all
resigned. Lord Carrington felt "it was a matter of honour" -- they were the
men charged with both guaranteeing the security of the Falklands and
evaluating General Galtieri's regime in Buenos Aires. "I was wrong in the
assessment of what they were doing," said Carrington, "and therefore I am
responsible" -- that word again. In interviews he reiterated the point:
"There has been a British humiliation. I ought to take responsibility for
it."
(continued)

If those comparisons are too highfalutin, then let's keep it simple: If a
municipal highway engineer had four bridges collapse on the same day, he'd
be expected to quit. It's easy for bureaucrats to hide under the language
of grief that the media instinctively deploy -- "tragedy," "sorrow,"
"pain." What happened on Tuesday may well be a "tragedy," but it is also,
for the responsible regulatory agency, all the things Fleet Street called
the Falklands invasion: a "humiliation," "fiasco," "disgrace."
And yet it seems that no one is planning to resign. And, worse, they're
carrying on exactly as before, with another ton of cumbersome regulations
that won't improve the safety of a single American. The most pitiful
performance of last week was Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta
solemnly announcing that, effective immediately, there would be no more
steak knives in first class and no more plastic knives anywhere. How they
must be quaking in Osama's training camps! How does forcing millions of
travellers to eat their rubber chickens with forks make commercial aviation
one jot safer?
Ms. Garvey is a Clinton appointee, Mr. Mineta a Bush one. It's not a
left/right thing, but something broader that speaks very poorly for our
culture. The airline cabin is the most advanced model of the modern
social-democratic state, the rarefied version of trends that, on the
ground, progress more slowly. There is no smoking. There is 100% gun
control. You are obliged by law to do everything the cabin crew tell you to
do. If the stewardess is rude to you, tough. If you're rude to her,
there'll be officers waiting to arrest you when you land. The justification
for all this is a familiar one -- that in return for surrendering
individual liberties, we'll all be collectively better off. That was the
deal: Do as you're told, and the FAA will look after you.
(continued)

On Tuesday morning, they failed spectacularly to honour their end of the
bargain -- as I'm sure the terrorists knew they would. By all accounts,
they travelled widely during the long preparations for their mission, and
they must have seen that an airline cabin is the one place where, thanks to
the FAA, you can virtually guarantee you'll meet no resistance. Indeed, in
their FAA-mandated coerciveness the average coach-class cabin is the
nearest the Western world gets to the condition of those terrorists' home
states. We've all experienced those bad weather delays where you're stuck
on the runway behind 60 other planes waiting to take off and some guy says,
"Hey, we've been in here a couple of hours now. Any chance of a Diet
Coke?", and the stewardess says he'll have to wait, and the guy's cranky
enough to start complaining. And one part of you thinks, "Yeah, I'm pretty
thirsty, too", but the rest of you, the experienced traveller, goes, c'mon,
sit down, pal, quit whining, don't make a fuss, they'll only delay us even
more.
And so, on those Boston flights, everyone followed FAA guidelines: the
cabin crew, the pilots, the passengers. There were four or five fellows
with knives or box-cutters, outnumbered more than ten to one. If they'd
tried to hold up that many people in a parking lot, they'd have been beaten
to a pulp. But up in the air everyone swallowed the FAA's assurance: Go
along with them, be co-operative, the Feds know how to handle these things.
I'm sure there were men and women in those seats thinking, well, there's
not very many of them and they don't have any real weapons, maybe if some
of us were to ... But by the time they realized they were beyond the
protection of the FAA it was too late.
We cannot know all that occurred on three of Tuesday's four terrible
flights. Barbara Olson's 10 attempted cellphone calls to the Justice
Department, trying to persuade them to put her through to her husband,
suggests at the least that there were people in those seats willing to defy
their captors.
But we do know a lot of what happened on that fourth plane, United Airlines
Flight 93. Thomas Burnett, Jeremy Glick, Mark Bingham and perhaps others
phoned their families to tell them they loved them and to say goodbye. Then
they rushed the hijackers. The plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania,
not at Camp David or the White House. Jeremy Glick knew he would never see
his three-month-old daughter again, but he also understood that he could
play a small part in preserving a world for her to grow up in. By being
willing to sacrifice themselves, Mr. Glick and his comrades saved
thousands, perhaps including even the Vice-President and other senior
officials. They took, in a word, responsibility.
Could you or I do that? This will be a long, messy, bloody war, in which
civilians -- salesmen, waitresses, accountants, Canadian tourists -- are in
the front line. America will need more Jeremy Glicks, and not just in the
air. What Dave Kopel, in a brilliant column for National Review, calls the
"culture of passivity" is spread very wide throughout the West -- the
belief that government knows best and that citizens have sub-contracted out
their responsibilities to protect and defend their liberty. The question of
whether America and its allies have the will to wage this war depends, in
large part, on our ability to resist that "culture of passivity."
(continued)

We know now that the government wasn't up there over upstate New York when
Flight 11 doglegged and began homing in on Manhattan. We know, too, that
when you're facing terrorists willing to kill and die that the decisive
moments are the first -- the few minutes before they've established control
or killed their first stewardess. So the next time it happens, we can
follow FAA guidelines -- or we can say screw 'em and their worthless
assurances, and rush forward to overpower the fanatics, even if the FAA has
seen to it we've nothing to charge them with except the rubber chicken.
If you want a name for it, try the "Minutemen" -- the men of the
Revolutionary War who were pledged to take the field at a minute's notice.
In this new war, we are all called upon to be Minutemen.
The heroism of the passengers of Flight 93 deserves America's highest
honours. And, instead of indulging in gestures like confiscating plastic
knives, the government should summon up the will to match their courage.